being far too simple. Tamerlane, the Tartar
emperor (died 1405), a passionate amateur,
finding chess ridiculously easy, complicated it
accordingly. His method, which racked and
strained ordinary brains, requiring intellectual
athletes to grapple with it, did not survive him.
At that time, there was great and little chess—
chess major and chess minor. The emperor
of course preferred the major, which was played
on a chess-board having ten squares one way,
and eleven the other. He named one of his sons
Schahrohk, because the news of his birth arrived
at the moment when, with his castle, or rohk, he
gave check to his adversary's king, or schah.

The Chinese chess-board consists, like ours,
of sixty-four squares; but they are all of the
same colour. In the midst of it is a broad
stripe, called the river Ho, which divides the
field of battle into two camps of thirty-two
squares each. The men belonging to each camp
are of different colours, ordinarily black and
red, and are placed at the point of intersection
of the squares, instead of on their surface; the
consequence of which is that nine men, instead
of eight, can take their places on the same line.
The disposal of the pieces on the first line is
this: War-chariot, horse, elephant, officer,
general, officer, elephant, horse, war-chariot.

Besides these, they have five soldiers, or
pawns, and two cannon, which answer to our
knights, attacking their enemy from a distance,
by passing over the other pieces. The general,
or king, the cannon, and the chariots, cannot
pass the river. The queen does not exist in
Chinese chess, but is replaced by two officers,
or ministers.

In Germany, the rules of chess do not allow
the making of a second queen, a third knight,
&c., out of pawns which have traversed the
board; but, to make up for the want, something
still more efficient has been invented. To
multiply combinations from the very outset, new
pieces have been added to the old ones. As
the queen combines the movements of the castle
and the bishop, so there are supplementary
pieces, uniting the moves of the bishop and the
knight, of the castle and the knight; which,
consequently, can give checkmate without the
help of any other piece.

For those who find a single game of chess too
light and frivolous a recreation, nothing is
simpler than to increase the task by playing
two or more games at once. The performance
of this feat is no novelty. A Saracen, named
Buseca, in the middle of the thirteenth century,
used to play on two chess-boards at once against
two of the best players in Italy. He also played
in Florence without seeing the chess-board.
Avabschar, a Mussulman doctor and historian,
who died in 1450, mentions, in his Life of
Timour, a celebrated Arab doctor who equalled,
if he did not surpass, Julius Caesar's versatility,
by simultaneously playing a game of trictrac
(more complex than our backgammon),
dictating a lesson, composing a copy of verses, and
directing a game of chess.

In the present century, Messrs. Harwitz and
Kieseritzky played two games at once without
a sight of the chess-board. The Monde Illustré
for October 21, 1861, published one of the five
games which L. Paulsen, a Hungarian, played
simultaneously without a sight of the chess-board,
with five different adversaries. Of the
two Morphys, Ernest the uncle, and Paul the
nephew, both remarkable players, the latter
proved himself a marvellous adept. In 1858,
at the Café de la Régence, he played against
eight separate adversaries at once, with no
chess-board to help his memory. Messieurs
Baucher, Birwith, Bornemann, Guibert,
Lequesne, Potier, Préti, and Seguin, all
distinguished players, sat each before his own proper
chess-board. Morphy had none; and yet he
beat them. Paulsen, however, challenged
Morphy, who declined. At the London chess tournay,
June, 1862, Paulsen won eleven games out
of thirteen, and gained the second prize.

Corollaries, offshoots, and amplifications of
chess, have been more numerous than
permanently popular. Some of them have had a short
run of favour, and have then fallen into oblivion.
It will suffice to mention two. Uranomachia,
the astrologers' game, was given to the world
in London, 1571. The chess-board for this
celestial contest is round, and the men represent
two sorts of planets fighting for the empire
of the skies.

The game of strategy, or military chess, was
produced by the Comte de Firmas-Périés, in
Paris, 1815. It can be played by two, four,
or six persons. Its machinery is very complicated,
consisting of a chess-board of either two
thousand six hundred and forty squares, or of
one thousand six hundred and seventeen only,
with nine hundred and forty pieces. Clever
players may make the game last from a whole
day to several weeks, with very unequal chances.
Several pieces can be moved at once. The
squares represent, by the differences of their
colours, great inequalities of ground, which can be
increased at the option of the players. Fields,
forests, villages, rivers, marshes, mountains,
some inaccessible, some practicable, vary and
perplex the operations. Each general (that is, each
player) has an army composed of infantry, light
cavalry, heavy cavalry, siege artillery, field
artillery, mortars, howitzers, and portable bridges.
The men are independent of their horses; and
each army has its divisions, commanded by
generals of division. One would say that, to
enlist as a volunteer and go through a course of
drill, would be less troublesome and more
practical than to learn the game of strategy.

The value of chess, as a mode of mental
training, has been exalted to a degree at least
equal to its deserts. A congress was
convoked to meet, in 1850, at Altembourg, in
Thuringia, to discuss the introduction of chess
into schools as an obligatory item of instruction;
to make it a German national game, and to
lombine all German chess clubs into one grand
echiquian academy. Franklin holds it to be a
great merit in chess that it offers sufficient
interest in itself without holding out any prospect